Pat,

last thing first:
> I hope you are not to exhausted by my untiring expostulations, those of you
> (if any) who have stuck to the bitter end!

I actually enjoyed to read it.

> to the cooked cereal prohibition--I have largely eliminated wheat, 'tho I
> wonder about soaking and THEN cooking,

I suppose that that will not work.
Once one has reduced his tolerance to
cooked or modified food, he will probably
react very quickly to cooked wheat.Even raw
wheat will probably cause problems.

I have to say probably, because I didn't try
it out. But I did eat my last piece of cake
6 years ago, after eating raw for 1/2 year
and it caused a very bad snuff that lasted
two weeks. And during my whole raw-eater and
instincto 'career' I constantly became more
sensitive to denaturated food. Nowadays I
even get problems from not-so-perfect
pseudo-'organic' bananas, for example. On
the other hand my health became better and
better. I can't remember the last time I did
'catch a cold'. And we (Marianne and I)
don't even have the normal reactions to
viruses. All we notice is tiredness or
weariness but no the 'usual' dropping nose,
headaches or whatever.

> >It intrigues me then, why humans have such extraordinary ability to secrete
> >aplha-amylase, the starch digesting enzyme, present in both saliva and
> >pancreatic secretions.  We have so much, that some biochemists call it
> >alph-amylase overkill.

I think that that is quite normal. Many of
our ancestors probably lived outside of the
big woods, so they didn't have so many fruits
and had to live from roots and vegetables.
And these very often contain lots of starch.
I sometimes love sweet potatoes, kohlrabi or
carrot. They all consist (AFAIK) mostly of
starch. And because Banana is a cereal it
contains lots of starch, too. And did you
every see the wild-growing cereals? As a
child I enjoyed to pass the stalks through
my fingers and grab the grain. I can imagine
our ancestor walking through the African
steppes, taking a bite of cereal here and
there, uncooked.

> I very seriously wonder if this comment is not key to this debate on grain
> and milk in the  diet: why is it so impossible to have biologically adapted
> to them in the past 10,000 years?

I thought about that many times and I think,
that the time span is too short. We are much
to similar to the other apes. And: Why debate
it, everyone can just try it out. He/She
should only reduces the tolerances first,
otherwise he/she wouldn't notice much.

> I've heard there may be no more than 100 instincto's in the U.S.

I was glad to here that there are some at all.

> But there are perhaps a billion healthy Asian's

But what does healthy mean? I think that only some
of the second-generation Instinctos can be
considered healthy. It is true that Asians don't
get cancer or clogged arteries, but they get
cancers of the stomach and guts, instead. (Because
they eat so 'hot' seasoned food.

> a 25'x50' garden in one's own yard

Yes, we really would enjoy one, but here in our
town houses with gardens are awfully expensive.

If I think only about the great compost that
we produce from all that organic fruits and
vegetables. We just 'harvested' such compost
from our old compost heap and the veggies now
grow like crazy with it. Marianne moved many
flowers into the new earth and we can see how
great it is for them. And there were LOTS of
earthworms in the compost heap! We now even
have 3 tomatoes and 1 avocado who just grew
out of the old compost!

- Karl